CHRIS GRANGER / THE TIMES-PICAYUNESmothered rabbit at New Orleans Food & Spirits.The restaurants listed illustrate how thoroughly Cajun cuisine has been baked into New Orleans food. Those labeled Pure bred are Cajun identified restaurants that offer unfiltered Cajun dishes. Second Generation restaurants have direct connections to the New Orleans Cajun Invasion of the 1970s and 1980s. Mixed Breed restaurants feature new American cooking by chefs who draw inspiration from Cajun cuisine.

Mark Bergeron's three casual neighborhood restaurants carry the genes of one in Houma that his grandparents owned and he managed before he opened the first New Orleans Food & Spirits in Harvey 15 years ago. The restaurant's aggressively uncatchy name doesn't exactly conjure images of shrimp boots, truck-stop boudin and zydeco. But once you've eaten the food, you won't doubt Bergeron when he mentions spitting BB's out of the smothered rabbit his father cooked for family dinner.

A version of that dish -- without the BB's -- is reprised every Thursday at New Orleans Food & Spirits, and it is amazing: a peppery fricassee in which brown onion gravy drips from juicy white meat onto a bed of soft white beans. The same dish given an Italian name by a tattooed chef in New York's East Village would make national food news.

The rest of the food at these restaurants sits at the intersection where New Orleans neighborhood restaurant staples meet approachable south Louisiana country cooking: po-boys, crawfish corn soup, shrimp stew, blackened catfish stuffed with shrimp-and-sausage jambalaya. The lineup is an example of how Cajun cuisine has seeped into the cooking at New Orleans restaurants of every price scale.